


Stability Isn't Nearly So Spectacular

by thatdamneddame



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, M/M, Post-Movie(s), Post-Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-20 08:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1503848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamneddame/pseuds/thatdamneddame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha actually knocks this time, which is how Clint knows that Something Is Definitely Up. </p>
<p>Or, after The Winter Soldier, Natasha goes to Clint's to find her new cover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stability Isn't Nearly So Spectacular

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as always and forever, to prettyasadiagram for the beta. And for Sylvia Wrath.

Natasha actually knocks this time, which is how Clint knows that Something Is Definitely Up. Still, he’s been on psychiatric evaluation masquerading as administrative leave for months, so he feels totally justified answering the door in his Angry Birds boxer shorts, his favorite purple fleece blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

“Please tell me that you knew it was me,” Natasha sighs when she sees him. She’s wearing a leather blazer and very tight pants. Clint knows that’s her version of business casual, but he has no idea why she’s wearing it on his doorstep.

He shrugs. “Haven’t had a lot of visitors recently.” In the months since Loki and New York, Clint has had exactly three visitors: the SHIELD shrink (who judged him), a Jehovah’s witness missionary (who judged him), and the Chinese delivery guy (who has clearly seen crazier shit than a guy wearing boxer shorts and the beginnings of a very pathetic beard).

When Natasha doesn’t really seem inclined to do anything more than make judgey eyebrows at Clint’s underwear, Clint prompts, “I thought you’d moved on from babysitting me to taking out pirates and becoming Captain America’s work wife.” It earns him an eye roll, which is pretty fucking good, all things considered.

“I’m coming in,” Natasha says, shouldering past him into his apartment before he even has the chance to refuse. Not that he would. He’s missed her. “Please tell me you’ve paid your cable bill recently.”

Clint hasn’t, at least he doesn’t think he has, but Natasha doesn’t really let herself get bogged down by questions like “is stealing cable from Clint’s geriatric neighbor wrong?”, so by the time he’s made a fresh pot of coffee, Natasha’s tuning in to CNN. There’s a lot of screaming people and frantic reports and burning rubble, which, whatever, Natasha didn’t have to force herself into his apartment and steal him cable for.

“Is this one of those times when you ask me if I think you can pull off bangs and then we never talk about it again?” Clint hazards a guess. (The reporter on the screen sure can’t, if only she’d asked Clint first.) He’s not even surprised when Natasha punches him. At least he doesn’t spill any coffee

“Pay attention,” she instructs, eyes fixed on the television.

Clint sips at his coffee and does as he’s told. The camera pans from some flaming piles of rubble to some panicking citizens to some giant ships crashed in a river. Except those aren’t ships. And that’s the Potomac.

Clint’s shoulders slump. “Aw, SHIELD.”

Natasha mutes the TV. “You got it in one.”

 

***

 

Clint and Natasha are called Strike Team Delta because they are the last resort. Technically, Delta is the best SHIELD has, but you don't put people like Clint and Natasha on milk runs or anything where you don't mind a little collateral damage. Strike Teams Alpha through Gamma are better than pretty much every other strike team in the United States anyway, so it's not like SHIELD is pulling its punches. Really, what all that means is that usually if there's a flaming pile of rubble Clint is usually directly involved.

"You and Captain America dismantled SHIELD?" Clint asks again, hoping the words will make sense in his head this time.

Natasha nods. "We had some help."

"From zombie Nick, Steve's boyfriend with wings, and Maria Hill?" Once, Clint got dosed with this crazy shit and had a series of fever dreams where Maria Hill was a sexually adventurous ostrich and a two-eyed Nickwas sweet on Hill's sugar—never did Clint think anything in real life would top that weirdness, but this is SHIELD. Or, was SHIELD.

"It's what we had to do," she tells him. "It wasn't SHIELD." She’d explained it to him clinically, like this was a debrief and Coulson or Sitwell would be along any minute to fine tune anything in the report the WSC might not like.

Clint doesn't have anything to say because it's fucked up and impossible for him to understand. He never had red on his ledger the way Natasha does, but Clint's always made the right calls the wrong way. SHIELD was good for him—it gave him structure and it gave him people he could trust. SHIELD showed Clint true north when he could only ever orient himself to magnetic poles, but now he's drinking coffee in his kitchen with Natasha wondering if it's been bullshit all along.

"Fuck HYDRA," Clint decides. "Fuck SHIELD, too. They were a bunch of assholes anyway."

Natasha hums and takes a sip of coffee. "That's not why I'm here."

Clint sighs. Of course that's not why she's here. Natasha has never really come around to check on Clint or gossip about work—she texts for the most part, calls when Clint's being particularly dense, but she leaves Clint to his shit and handles her stuff alone. She's been even more reclusive since New York. Clint actually has a whole set of brown recluse spider jokes lined up for her, but Natasha won't find them funny and Phil's dead.

"You need me to kill someone?" he asks. It's either that or she's finally coming to pull Clint's head out of his ass, but it's been months and mostly she just comes by to make sure Clint hasn't died of scurvy.

Natasha shakes her head. "I need a new cover. The internet knows mine." She pushes her phone across Clint's kitchen table, and he'll be fucked, but goddamn Natasha Romanoff is trending on Twitter.

"Well this looks bad." He thumbs through some of the tweets. Definitely bad. Probably worse.

 

***

 

Step one in becoming Natasha Romanoff's go-to friend in an emotional crisis is to recognize that Natasha doesn't really understand friendship the way the rest of the world does. Clint was the one who brought her in—he was there when she and Nick imprinted on each other like a pair of particularly homicidal ducks—so Clint recognizes that the Natasha he knows is just a version of herself. Clint knows the Natasha that she thinks he either needs or wants to know. And that's the one reason he doesn't get his panties in a bunch and demand to know why the fuck she didn't at least text when a fucking intelligence urban legend murdered Nick Fury.

"I think you should join a roller derby league," Clint advises instead. Sometimes he doesn't sleep for days and he's smashed every mirror in his place. He knows why Natasha didn't call. "You could be The Widowmaker. Basher RaMoan. Sylvia Wrath.”

She smiles at him, as close as she ever gets to genuine. "I need to lay low for a while, until this blows over."

"You think it will?" Clint doesn't need cable to know the world has gone to shit. In the past two years, there's been New York, the Mandarin, Thor in London, and now this. People like her and Clint are only ever going to become more obvious, especially if anything like the Avengers is ever needed again. He knows that the world isn't going back to the days when the Black Widow and Hawkeye could destroy a perfectly good neighborhood in Budapest and come home to anonymity.

Natasha spins the mug in front of her, ceramic clinking on cheap Formica counters. "There’s going to be something bigger one day and they'll need us. We'll come back and we'll be forgiven."

"Are you so sure about that?"

"The world loves Tony Stark." She shrugs, like it's a simple truth. It isn't. Natasha's entire file is on the internet. Clint only knows a handful of her stories, but he knows that Natasha’s done things that Tony Stark couldn’t even dream were possible.

"I don't think you're too shabby," he tells her, because sometimes these things need to be said. Because Natasha is the only person who needs forgiveness more than he does. “Who needs Stark?”

Her smile is less genuine this time. "It's going to take a while," she says. She picks up her phone and thumbs through her Twitter feed and jumps ship on their conversation. She has always been terrible accepting compliments.

Clint takes another sip of coffee. "When has it ever taken anything else?"

 

***

 

For all this appears to be a colossal shitstorm, it is in many ways nothing Clint and Natasha haven't done before. They lie in bed at night, side by side, not touching and not tired and too wired on the coffee they drank because the only other option was talking about their feelings. It should feel familiar, but Clint hasn't done anything more than a milk run recently and Natasha's been hanging out with Captain America and Phil's still dead.

"We should talk to Stark and Banner," Clint says. He is more often capable of thinking the right thing rather than doing it. That's why he has Phil. Had Phil. He still gets the tenses mixed up. "They should hear it from you or Cap."

"Stark will already know," is all Natasha says. Of course Stark knows; everyone knows. Clint's stolen cable is filled with reporters talking about secrets and guns and national security like they have any fucking clue what SHIELD was supposed to stand for or what kind of shit is out there before people like Clint and Natasha clean it up.

(The news doesn't mention the Winter Soldier, though, and Natasha doesn't talk about it besides saying it happened, and Clint figures they'll get to it later or not at all.)

Clint reaches out across the bed and takes Natasha's hand in his. "I'm glad you did it," he admits. Clint's mainly a SHIELD specialist because he has a very obscure and violent set of skills and working for the government was the only way he knew how to do any good with it. But SHIELD has been Hydra all along and one day Clint will get over being lied to, being used, being a weapon in someone else's arsenal. He knows Natasha feels the same way, too. "I'm glad you're okay."

Natasha squeezes his hand and does not let go. They stay like that all night—not sleeping but together.

 

***

 

They spend days going through the information.

Clint likes having a mission again. Likes having Natasha there ordering him around and stealing his clothes and getting him Netflix. He's never done well on his own without someone to point the way. He hasn't done well on his own, with nothing but milk runs and SHIELD shrinks for company.

That first morning, Natasha had said, "They're still out there. We need to know exactly what we gave them."

"You trust me?" He'd asked, despite himself. Nick doesn't even trust him the same any more. The public breakdown of Selvig just made everyone more nervous around him

Natasha had rolled her eyes. "I never stopped" And that's something. A starting place better than any of the trust exercises he's bullshitted his way through for the past two years.

So they sift through everything Natasha dumped on the internet and read about their own lives in clinically detached SHIELD files and overly sentimental op-eds. They read about SHIELD ops they've been on and ops they heard about and ops they didn't think could be true but apparently were.

They have articles and notes tacked to Clint’s wall, anything they think they might need to check out, but by day three they're leaving comments on Jezebel and Slate and The Wire correcting facts while they binge watch _American Horror Story_. There is an ache in his shoulders not from a bow and his eyes are dry; it's the best he's felt since before New York.

 

***

 

"What's our move?" he asks, a week in. Natasha is wearing his pajamas and there's a _Haunted History_ marathon playing on his TV. So far, Clint suspects that Natasha's new cover is just the nerdiest, most annoying part of herself. But beyond that he doesn’t know. She's told him about Steve and Sam and Bucky. About Fury in Europe. They both know that with Hydra, you cut off one head, two more grow back—someone needs to be looking out for home.

"There's always _Downton Abbey_ ," Natasha suggests, totally sincere and totally being a shit all at the same time.

"Nat."

"You sound like Rogers," she grumbles, picking up a manila folder at random from their pile of printed-out crap they haven't read yet. And he's going to ask her exactly what the fuck that means but Natasha's looking at the folder bright eyed and slack jawed. "Oh," she says. She holds the file tighter, knuckles going white.

"Oh?" he asks, but Natasha says nothing. Eyes skimming the pages as fast as possible. "Nat? What is it?"

Natasha says nothing, but she doesn't resist when he pulls the folder from her hands.

There, in black and white, is Phil Coulson's face. It's not his ID photo, the one Clint used to always tease him about. This one is new. This one is recent—his hairline matches the one Clint remembers, and there are a few more lines around his eyes than when Clint last saw him. Phil looks tired. He looks alive.

**Deceased** , the file reads in official red ink and then, the line below, **Status Update: Phillip J. Coulson, Alive**

There are pages after detailing things Clint didn't think we're possible, doesn't think should be possible or done or even thought of, even if they did something like bring Phil back from the dead. Clint drops the file. His hands, always steady, shake. Natasha sits across from him; she does not pick up the file again.

"If he's alive, if he had a team, then he’s going to be taking down any Hydra cells he can find," she says after a long silence. Her voice shakes but Clint isn’t really listening, his mind blank and buzzing and numb.

"That's our move, Clint," she says, reaching out and taking Clint's hand in her own, trying to shake him out of it. "That's my cover."

Her hands are small and gun callused. Her hands are small and warm and alive. Clint has spent a lot of time after New York working through PTSD and guilt and regret. He's spent a lot of time thinking about Phil and everything that could have been, that might have been, that he was too chicken shit to admit. Clint has spent two years mourning a friend who is apparently alive. He’s spent even longer than that working for SHIELD that has been Hydra all along.

He takes a deep, steadying breath. "Okay," he agrees. "That's our move."

Natasha smiles at him, gentle and genuine, over his breakfast counter. All of her covers have been blown and SHIELD is dead and Phil Coulson is alive. There is nothing left but this, but each other. It's a brave new world.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes _Brave New World_ by Aldous Huxley because I couldn't help myself:
> 
> "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”


End file.
